Quotes About Perspective

I mean people die every day, and the world is still spinning." Mom takes my paper and turns it around to study it. "That's a good thing." "Are you talking about life, death, or my bird?" "Life is good. Death is a mystery. The bird needs work.

If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, go ahead and enjoy the view.

But in the book," I say, "the mockingbird is supposed to be a symbol of innocence. That's why it's a sin to kill one." "Who says it's a symbol of innocence?" asks Mort. "Teachers," I tell him. "Book reviewers, critics --" "Wikipedia," Elena calls from behind the window display.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

If you show somebody a piece of your work and you ask them 'What do you think?', they will probably say it's okay because they don't want to offend you. Next time, instead of asking if it's right, ask them what's wrong. They may not say what you want to hear, but the chances are they will give you a truthful criticism.

So: it's wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, right-minded, dull and smug.

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.

In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided limitations.

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn't mean they couldn' t happen in another.

The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged.

But it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.